1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system for processing character images which is useful in an apparatus for example, an OCR (Optical Character Reader).
2. Description of the prior art
As an input means for a computer system, an OCR has been used. In an OCR, a manuscript is irradiated by a light beam. An image sensor reads character images on the manuscript, and the read character images are recognized as characters (including alphanumeric characters, symbols, etc.). The data of the recognized characters is transmitted to a computer system to be further processed.
When recognizing character images as characters in an OCR, character image strings are extracted from the read images, and then an individual character image is extracted from one of the character image strings. This is compared with all of the character patterns stored in a dictionary of the OCR, and then recognized as one character. Since each extracted character image is compared with all character patterns in the dictionary, it takes a long time to recognize a character image as one of the characters, because of the number of the character patterns in the dictionary.
Moreover, the rate of recognition (the ratio of correct recognition) of an OCR having a conventional recognition system is inferior because, for example, in English, there are similar characters (such as "S" and "s", "O" and "o", etc.) and characters of the same shape (such as "," and ".sup..multidot. " ".sup..multidot. " etc; hereinafter such characters are referred to as same shape characters")